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it was too risky for them with all the attention we’d attracted. I was scared, and I didn’t know what else to do. Finally, I got really hungry and thirsty, so I started walking. I came to a place with lots of houses and hid behind one of them. That’s where Bobbi found me. She’s the blond woman in the car.”
    “Did you tell her you were left behind by a spaceship?”
    “No,” Cam says. “For all I knew, she would have handed me over to the soldiers. So I told her I’d run away from home.
    “She didn’t ask any questions. She just said, ‘Yeah, I know what that’s like.’ Then she said I could stay withher until I figured things out. I don’t know why. I was just thankful.”
    Cam pauses, and I’m so involved in her story that I just wait, silently urging her to go on.
    “So I stayed there, trying not to do anything to make Bobbi change her mind and kick me out. I just needed a place to stay until I could signal my parents. Bobbi wasn’t around much. She was a bartender down the street at a place called the Blue Eagle.
    “The first week everything was okay. But then Bobbi met up with Ray. She said she used to date him before and they were getting back together. Don’t ask me why she likes him. He’s mean when he’s drinking, which is pretty much all the time. She even let him move in with us—just like that—and things got bad real fast. There were a lot of fights, some about me.”
    Cam stops and makes a face, adding, “Ray hated having me around. I know he wanted Bobbi to kick me out.”
    I feel my dislike for Ray growing.
    Cam sighs and continues. “But Bobbi let me hang around, probably because by then I was doing all the cooking and cleaning and laundry. Then Ray got in some kind of trouble and he said we had to leave town. Bobbi quit her job and loaded her stuff into a trailer, along with Ray’s stuff. I didn’t want to leave with them, but I didn’t know what else to do or where to go. We ended up at a motel a ways down the highway from here.”
    I try to picture the place she’s talking about. “That place near the diner, with the busted-out sign?” I ask.
    She nods.
    “I didn’t even think it was open.”
    “The old lady who owns it could hardly believe it when we stopped and said we wanted to check in.”
    “So that’s where you were staying … with Ray and Bobbi?”
    “Yeah, for the past few days.” Cam takes a deep breath and says, “You want me to keep going?”
    “Well, yeah. How did you get the cut on your head? How did you end up here?”
    “All right. Here’s what happened, okay? Ray has a collection of hubcaps.” She rolls her green eyes. “And I saw a picture in an old magazine in the motel room of a bird feeder made out of a hubcap. I was bored so I took one lousy hubcap out of the trailer and was using some of his tools to poke holes in the edge so I could attach strings like in the picture, and Ray came outside and was mad because I ruined one of his stupid hubcaps. Then Bobbi came out and started hollering, too, saying she’d done me this huge favor and why was I provoking Ray. I said I didn’t see what the big deal was and Ray said, ‘I’ll teach you to mouth off.’”
    Cam makes another face. “Ray is very sensitive about people ‘mouthing off’ to him. So he grabbed the hubcap from me and swung it and it hit me in the head. Then he pushed me into the motel room. I heard a noise and it was his screw gun, and he screwed the door shutso I couldn’t get out. And then he left in the car with Bobbi.”
    I have been standing and listening, nearly hypnotized by her story, and now I slowly sit down in the chair across from her at the kitchen table. My eyes never leave her face.
    After a moment she continues. “I didn’t know—or care—if they were ever coming back. But being locked in, it’s—” She stops and looks down at her hands, which are twisting over and over on the tabletop.
    “It’s a horrible feeling,” she goes on in a low voice.